February 9, 1999

Mark Meadows and Jill Heinerth went on a mission to B Tunnel today to map the area of the cave where new line had been laid and to set a radio coil at the current end of the line. Their decompression schedule for the 5 hour bottom time dive takes them through the night before they can exit and describe their dive in significant detail.

Once Mark and Jill had been locked into the decompression chamber at 30 meters (100 ft), the gear from their dive was returned to the equipment trailer. Here the digital wall mapper has been hoisted into the trailer after the propulsion end was detached the batteries could be charged. Jim King (left front) and Jason Mallinson (right front) help run the winch and guide the mapper into the trailer while Doug Arnberg (crouching in trailer) makes sure the mapper doesn't hit the floor. National Geographic cinematographer Simon Boyce (right), with camera ever in hand, films Mark Hercun guiding the front of the mapper. Bill Stone watches attentively in the rear as he waits to download the data from B Tunnel. Meadows and Heinerth's dive produced a rich harvest of 3D data -- 9.25 megabytes of highly compressed information that will ultimately expand to nearly 100 megabytes of 3D point-tuple data (XYZ locations for the wall points) [photo ©1999 Barbara Anne am Ende].

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David's Corner:

Today I woke up and came over to Mission Control for the 9 a.m. team meeting. I then helped some team members put the 3D mapper back together. After that I helped bring the mapper and the scooters down to the water. Next I went swimming for a while and then came out and dried off.

I went out and watched today's mission people come out of the water at about 8:20 p.m. for decompression. They spent 5 hours inside the cave. When they were coming up there were A LOT of lights on the bottom from the National Geographic film team. It sort of looked like fireworks going off. That was really cool and it was the favorite part of my day. You could see straight down 110 feet to the bottom of the sand slope from the edge of the habitat barge. I helped pull up the life support lines as the bell came up.

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There was quite a stir at Mission Control today. Barbara came in this morning to find her squirrel, Nibbles, kidnapped and this photo left in her digital camera. Barbara spread the word among the team hoping someone might get the word to the culprits that it was hard to get that much loot so quickly, but she would come through before the day was out. Sure enough, around 6 p.m. Nibbles was returned by a masked man upon receipt of the goods. Nibbles suffered no physical damage (ripping the duct tape off his mouth hurt like heck), but is mentally traumatized. (PS to Bonnie--Nuts is in seclusion fearing the kidnappers, or is that "squirrel-nappers", will strike again).

This is the photo left in Barbara's camera.

Our surveillance camera captured this picture of the return of Nibbles. Note the ski mask on the napper who collected his 4 "peparonee pitsas" and 4 bags of "choklat chip cookys."

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